World War II: Frontline Command

World War II has come to London. The roar of artillery mixes with
the chatter of small arms fire and the shouts of the soldiers. The
bodies of the slain litter the crater-pockmarked earth, while the
flames of burning buildings and destroyed armour divisions cast
eerie flickering light on structures still standing. Half tracks
and tanks churn grassy fields into muddy quagmires, and you can
almost smell the heavy scents of cordite and death on the air.

This is no dystopian alternate reality, though, because on the
banks of the placid Thames, one of the UK's most famous development
studios is recreating the battlefields of Europe in one of the most
promising strategy games we've ever laid eyes on. As the sluggish
waters of the river flow past the windows of their wharfside
offices, the guys and gals of the Bitmap Brothers bring to life the
invasion of Fortress Europe as the development of World War II:
Frontline Command enters its final stages.

Dulce et Decorum Est

The Second World War is en vogue at the moment among game
developers, thanks in no small part to the massive success of the
Medal of Honor (sic) series. Strategy games set in the era,
however, have uniformly been extremely hardcore affairs - with
CDV's Sudden Strike titles being the closest thing to a mass-market
WW2 strategy game in the past few years. The team at the Bitmap
Brothers is determined to change all that, and WW2 Frontline
Command looks set to achieve the twin goals of pleasing both casual
strategy fans and hardcore WW2 nuts with a combination of
playability, superb graphics, a slick interface and incredible
attention to detail.

The game covers the period from D-Day through to VE-Day, with early
missions involving softening up the German defences in Normandy and
leading your troops up Omaha beach leading on to campaigns
throughout Europe. Wisely, the team has chosen to stray a little
from the traditional beaten path of WW2 games and has focused on
less-known encounters, allowing them to make adjustments for
playability without running the risk of annoying war buffs by
altering well-known historical situations. However, all the famous
battles are present and correct, including Omaha Beach, Operation
Market Garden, the Battle of the Bulge, breaching the Siegfried
Line and, of course, the final Allied assault on the Eagle's Nest.

More historical accuracy comes courtesy of the range of units
available in the game, which the designers claim is an exhaustively
comprehensive collection of every piece of military kit that saw
service in these theatres of war. The range of units on offer is
certainly fantastically varied, and the type of armour and weaponry
on each unit has been researched meticulously by the team - even to
the degree that units have accurate depictions of weak armour
patches. Tanks, for example, generally have significantly stronger
armour on the front than on the back and sides - and sometimes a
critical hit to the turret will prevent it rotating, thus crippling
the machine by giving it a small fixed field of fire.

Conscript Boot Camp

The game offers two very different modes of play, namely
Recruit and Veteran. Although these two modes do broadly reflect
the difficulty levels of the game, the differences run a lot deeper
than the number of enemy units or intelligence of the enemy AI. The
Recruit mode is a much more arcade-style experience; your infantry
units gradually regain their health after battles and have
unlimited supplies of ammunition, for example. In Veteran mode -
which is a 25 stage campaign divided into five distinct segments,
as opposed to the 12 stage linear campaign in Recruit mode -
ammunition is a major consideration, and while your infantrymen do
regain health over time, it happens with agonising slowness.
Veteran mode also introduces the game's critical hit system, which
can necessitate mid-battle repairs to your units.

One element of the campaigns which deserves a special mention is
the final levels at the end of each segment - or rather, the
unusual system which allows you to influence how these levels play
out during earlier battles. Your actions early in the game -
particularly in regard to secondary objectives - will trigger
special events on these later levels, so for example taking out a
battery of anti-aircraft guns in one level could earn you a
much-needed parachute drop of troops three levels down the line.
It's a unique method of rewarding players for completing secondary
objectives, and one which lends an interesting air of continuity to
the proceedings.

Another interesting factor of the gameplay is the troop morale
system, which will be familiar to players of serious wargames but
perhaps less so for general RTS gamers. Your troops gain morale by
being near each other, and they gain a lot of morale by being near
a command unit (I guess the battlefield is a very odd place, since
I know fairly few people who get a morale boost by having their
boss stood next to them); but being alone or losing skirmishes saps
morale heavily, affecting the weapons accuracy and overall combat
effectiveness of the unit. Very low morale causes units to "go
hedgehog", as the designers describe it, a state in which troops
curl up on the ground and cry (although they will still follow
orders, unlike the infuriatingly lily-livered soldiers in the Close
Combat series); very high morale can cause "hero mode", where
amazing feats of bravery or critical hits are much more likely to
occur.

Play it by ear

It's all very well to describe the interesting gameplay
features, I hear you cry, but what is the actual basic gameplay
itself like? Well, utilising the magical Eurogamer videogame
cocktail shaker, the answer is that it's like a mix of equal parts
of Sudden Strike and Close Combat, shaken up with a dash of
Commandos 2 and served with a garnish of C&C Generals' graphics
engine. Each level, in case you hadn't worked this out already,
gives you a certain fixed number of troops and armour with which to
complete your objectives. There's no resource management, no
construction and no harvesting, making this a pure strategic combat
sim - your only resources are the troops under your command, and
using them wisely is the only way to progress.

As such, the combat model is a lot richer and more interesting than
you'll find in most strategy games. Line of sight is a vital
element of the game, and it's a system that's modelled almost
perfectly by Frontline Command. Troops standing up behind a hedge
can see into the field beyond - and equally, can be seen by anyone
on the other side - but crawling along the ground next to a hedge
renders both you and the enemy blind. Tanks have a conical field of
vision rather than a circular one, giving skilled players a chance
to slip an engineer up behind one and destroy it with an explosive
charge, and perhaps best of all, commanders and snipers have
binoculars which can be activated to sweep the nearby landscape for
enemy units, or to "spot" for mortar or other artillery using the
game's shared field of vision system.

This accurately modelled sight system is perhaps one of the most
interesting parts of Frontline Command, because it opens up a
variety of new tactics which don't really work in other strategy
games. Proper ambushes are a vital part of the game - ranging from
simple traps in urban areas to having a row of grenadiers pop up
from behind a hedgerow as an enemy tank thunders past. Spotting for
your artillery is also of great importance; you'll often find
yourself sneaking a command unit up towards enemy lines so that
your heavy guns can be brought into play using shared line of
sight. What you can't see, you can't attack - and thankfully, the
computer AI plays fair on this score, so you'll never find that
your carefully planned ambush goes to pot because the enemy
mysteriously knew your position.

A terrible beauty

If you're going to
depict slaughter, destruction and suffering, the least you can do
is make it look nice - and the team at the Bitmap Brothers have
certainly achieved that. Frontline Command stands head and
shoulders over any other game in its class, with extremely well
done, fully rotating and zoomable 3D maps and units, complete with
great dynamic lighting effects, impressive explosions and detailed
models. The game isn't quite as good looking as C&C Generals,
but it's got significantly more artistic flair and best of all, it
runs like a dream on systems on which Generals would be dropping
frames all over the place.

Overall, Frontline Command is looking very good indeed, and we were
very impressed with the broad appeal of the game. There really is
something for everyone here; anyone who enjoyed Sudden Strike will
almost certainly love Frontline Command, as will anyone who got
into Commandos (although it's quite a different game really).
Casual PC RTS fans will also find a lot to enjoy in this game, and
perhaps this is the biggest achievement of the title, if the team
can pull it off - it looks set to be a game which makes the WW2
realistic strategy genre accessible to the average gamer without
alienating the hardcore.

The version of Frontline Command which the developers showed us
wasn't completely finished, but it was very close indeed, and only
balancing, tweaking and bugfixes remain on the to-do list before
the May 2nd ship date of the game. We'll let you know our final
thoughts on the game closer to the release date.